Frictions of management: engaging and performing ‘nature’ in Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park

This work offers a more-than-human, performative reconfiguring of Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park, that embraces a motley collection of natures. Previously national parks have been understood as spaces of wilderness that require management to protect them from the detrimental effects of the human population. However as boundaries between nature and culture are being broken down and nature is recognised as connected to and entangled with culture, universal notions of national parks are brought into question. If there is no universal and true nature that is separate to humans and culture then: what is the purpose of national parks? How do decisions get made about what counts as national park nature and what species belong in park spaces? And what is the role of park management? It is these questions that I seek to tackle in this project. I combine Tsing’s notion of ‘friction’, with performative more-than-human geographies to rethink the ways in which Ku-ring-gai Chase is constantly being enacted by more-than-human bodies, objects and forces. I argue that if we think differently about national park nature, then we can also rethink national park management, not as a straightforward human process of preserving or conserving a universal ‘nature’, but as a set of more-than-human encounters that come together in moments of ‘”friction”: the awkward, unequal, unstable and creative qualities of interconnection across difference’ (Tsing 2005: 4). Throughout this thesis I examine a number of ‘frictions’ that spark up when universal notions of ‘national park nature’, ‘nativeness’ and ‘management’ land on the ground in Ku-ring-gai Chase and become messy as they encounter and rub up against the local. The point is not to show how to best manage Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park, but to challenge thinkings and doings to highlight the work that park management does in creating the park on a daily basis. I aim to show how Ku-ring-gai Chase is constituted by a myriad of natures that are constantly being created and recreated through messy, more-than-human encounters of friction.